EA - Cultural EA considerations for Nordic folks by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cultural EA considerations for Nordic folks, published by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen on October 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I wrote this to list some cultural EA considerations from a Finnish/Nordic perspective. I guess some other people might find it useful too. And some others might feel that all of this is very obvious to them. If you spot any mistakes or disagree on something please let me know in the comments! US/UK cultural stuff Many EA folks are located in the UK, especially London and Oxford Even more EA folks are located in the US, especially in the Bay Area, which is an area in California and has places like San Francisco and Berkeley in it. This area is also known for having many IT companies (if you have heard of Silicon Valley this is the same place). This place is so common for EAs to live in that if you see posts like “is anyone up for going to the park” in an EA group they probably live there. (Kind of like people from Helsinki forget there are other places in Finland.) And some US EA folks are in Boston which is on the other side of the country. Of course there are EAs also in other US places but these are some of the biggest ones. It is more common to move to countries within the anglophone world (for example from Australia to the US) for work or study. People in EA might assume you’d be willing to do that (or that what is stopping you from doing that are external conditions and not for example “wanting to live in Finland”). Many cities many EAs live in have very high living costs. Thus, even full-time working adults often do flat sharing. This is why some people have set up EA (or rationalist) group houses: they’d prefer to live with like-minded folks. Since the state is not that great at taking care of people in the US, many people feel a social expectation to give money to their struggling relatives or acquaintances, for example if they don’t have enough to pay for a medical operation. Because of this, US non-EA folks might think they are already being altruistic in their daily lives – they are, but it is not the impartial and cost-effective type. In Finland it might be more common for non-EAs to feel like they should not be asked to donate, because helping all people should be outsourced to the state and helping should not be the responsibility of an individual. (I mostly agree with the sentiment but we don’t live in an ideal world, so help from individuals is still needed.) Other geographical stuff There are quite some EA/rationalist folks in Central Europe as well, in particular in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Also, Prague has a lot of EA/rationalist folks and established locations that are used for rationalist workshops and EA coworking. Many other Western places have EA groups, some of them bigger than others. There are also EAs in non-Western places but many non-Western groups are still small. But not all, for example EA Philippines is quite active. Out of Nordic countries, the probably most well-established EA activity happens in Norway, but all Nordic countries have active EA national organizations and are catching up. In the EA context Estonia is sometimes counted as a Nordic country. It has more EA activity than other Baltics and participates in some Nordic collaboration. If you are interested in the cross-cultural aspect of EA, you are in luck A lot of EAs like meeting (or even housing) other EAs when traveling, so if you are going abroad anyway, a good option is to check if there is a local group where you could meet new interesting people. You can also connect to other EAs across the world through online EA stuff such as EA Anywhere or the EA Gathertown Coworking Space (you don’t need to be working on anything directly EA related to spend time on the latter!) Donations In the US, it is quite common to donate large sums ...